Come to the Edge_ A Memoir - Christina Haag [50]
“On the street—I keep thinking I see you. You make me emotional, and I’m not like that. I want to say your name all the time.”
The cab stopped on Forty-second Street, and I walked across to the restaurant. Through the glass, I could see faces I knew. Happy. Young. Some from high school, most from college. John’s roommate, Rob Littell, with his shirt askew, was sliding across the floor doing his ski move. Art majors boogied in groups, punctuating with jumps and hoots. Classicists shimmied solo. Girls who grew up in Manhattan took up space, looping around the sides of the room and executing serpentine finger drills worthy of Indonesian temple goddesses. Frat boys got down with Iranian beauties, making up with enthusiasm what they lacked in finesse. I dropped my bag by a pile of jackets near the door and found my friends, the roommates from Benefit Street. Chris was talking to Kissy, and Lynne stood close to her boyfriend, Billy.
“He’s here somewhere,” I heard Lynne say over the din. “He was just asking about you.”
Then he appeared, smiling so big, and anything I feared was gone. With one hand, he led me into the center of the dance floor. And when the fast song got slow, when the Stones bled into Joan Armatrading, I leaned into him. If there were people talking about us, about me, if there were eyes of judgment or of envy, I shut them out. Like Annabella, the character I had left on the stage that night, I looked into the eyes of my Giovanni and thought of the love that overcomes everything.
When the party was over, we drifted outside. The April air was balmy but still cool enough for a coat. There were no cabs in sight. John stepped off the curb to scout, and I turned to say my goodbyes. After a moment, a friend whispered as she hugged me, “Be careful, Christina.” I knew she was not referring to the slick street.
I was stunned. Was there something she knew that I didn’t? I wanted to say, Can’t you tell? Can’t you see how he feels? How I feel? How happy we are? How long we’ve waited? How right this is?
“What?” I said, my face flushed.
She stopped herself. She knew him well. “Just be careful.”
A cab pulled up, and John whisked me inside. “1040 Fifth,” he said to the driver, before sinking back beside me and pushing his foot against the jump seat. “Mummy’s away tonight.” And we set off.
1040. His mother’s home. The stone scallop shell of the Pilgrim above the taut green awning. The paperwhites in the vestibule at Christmas. The front gallery where everyone gathered at parties. The narrow hallway near the bedrooms that was lined with black-and-white photographs and collages of summers in Greece, the Cape, Montauk. His old room, with the captain’s bed and the navy sheets and the old school paperbacks and the tall cabinet filled with his father’s scrimshaw. I had been to 1040 many times, but this was the first time I would be alone with him there.
I don’t know why we went there that night instead of to his apartment across the park or to mine in Brooklyn. As the cab drove off, I did not find it curious that we, at age twenty-five, would stay at his mother’s, but rather I thought it was wonderful that there were so many possibilities. I remember a quickening of hope that maybe, with John, I could grow up and not grow up, I could have an adult life but not lose the girl, the jeune fille who was careless and wanted to dance and wore stockings with tears.
When I was twenty-five, I wanted freedom. I was afraid of being hemmed in, of having responsibilities and limits. None of the grown-up women I knew seemed happy. Not my mother or her friends or the few of mine who had begun to marry. When I was twenty-five, I cared passionately about two things: acting and love. With John, I thought I could have both. He was the first boyfriend I’d had who wore a suit and tie to work, but he also possessed the playfulness of a large dog.
The lights got brighter as we drove past the strip of triple-X theaters near Times Square, and I thought, There’ll be no relationship talks, no conflicts, no jealousy, no drama. None of the things